


In Pace

by hellkitty



Category: Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-24
Updated: 2012-06-24
Packaged: 2017-11-08 14:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/444233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty





	In Pace

He’d been here before, the shame and pain like twin serpents twining around the hard red twisting mass of pain. He’d been here before, that spaceless, timeless vertigo, the landscape of nothingness, blackness with depth and mass pressing in upon him.

He’d died before. He was dying again.

Drift fought it, as he had before.

It was who he was, what he was: he fought everything.He’d fought in the gutters, he’d fought in the war, on both sides.He’d fought with himself.It was…him.So he thrashed in the spiky red net of agony, clawing his way toward consciousness which seemed to slip farther and farther away with every desperate lunge, a tiny light forever receding.

And he was falling, lurching downward, pitching headlong, spinning and confused, into the maw of blackness.

The serpents fell away, burning off in the fall of death, and he was left, suddenly, shivering and alone, hunched the way he had in the gutters, as though he’d come all this way—all this way—to end up back there, back then, having as little as he’d ever had. The agony of his ruined body receded, the way the night and terror do before the hem of dawn. The blackness was so deep and thick that it was white, the way pleasure too intense can be pain.And he felt, somehow, with some feeble atrophied sense, something coming for him, an arrival, white and massive and filled with the rushing sound of beating wings.

Wing.

What do you say? What do you say to the one who changed everything, who lit a fire of hope inside you?What do you say to the one who wasted himself on you, believed in you when you didn’t believe in yourself? What do you say to the one who had paid a high price for his faith?

Drift had rehearsed this, hundreds of times. He’d practiced the words, the hard swell of gratitude, pure and sharp like a sword of crystal.He’d imagined himself, straight and proud, ready for reunion.Not like this: tattered and ruined, smeared with energon, streaked with fluids, half his armor pitted and stripped, shivering with pain. One who had lost. One who was lost.   
  
They were the same.

He wasn’t ready.He’d never been, he realized, ready.And all the pretty speeches he’d practiced, all the eloquent words he’d ached over, scattered in the wake of Wing’s arrival like so much ash.

He’d never felt so naked, so exposed, every sin, every secret laid bare under those golden optics.

“Drift.” Wing’s voice, as he’d remembered it, sweeter and richer than in all his dreams. “Don’t be afraid.”

He wasn’t afraid. He was ashamed, disgusted with himself. There was a difference.

“Drift.”A movement, the white light coalescing, but still not solid, as though Wing were made from glowing pearls.Drift felt the warmth brush over him, his ruined shoulder, his damaged arm.“You were always too hard on yourself.”

“I need to get back,” Drift said, finally, his own voice an ugly, grating croak next to the liquid music of Wing’s.

A sympathetic sound, the incandescent hand stroking the battered shape of his red spaulder. “Not this time, Drift.”

“They need me.”He looked up, for the first time, the cracks in his blue lenses glittering in the white darkness.

“What do _you_ need?”

“I need to help them.” He felt himself shudder, his entire body wracked with emotion.He was glad he was beyond pain—this was enough torment, this helplessness, this need colliding with inability.Because he knew Wing was right, in that way beyond knowing.This was…the end. He had come back before, but this pealed with finality, all of it.And he wanted to get mad at death, as though it were a thing he could get mad at, scream at, fight against, but he knew—he knew—that death had let him slip its clutches before, giving him chance after chance after chance, as though death believed in his redemption. “You don’t understand.”

“I do.” A flicker of a smile, understanding and sad. “But you’ve done all anyone could expect, and then some.”

“It wasn’t enough.” His mouth set in a hard line, lipplates slick with energon. It tasted bitter, bitter as his words. It was fitting.

“More than enough,” Wing said, with that maddening, gentle patience. He’d always treated Drift like a wild thing needing to be tamed. The hand moved, resting on Drift’s, curled, still, around the hilt of one of his short swords. “It’s time to stop fighting.”

The words struck him, like a blow to the chassis.“It’s all I can do,” he said, pitiful and thin.His hand had locked down over the hilt, the servos shorted.He couldn’t let go.

“It’s all you’ve ever let yourself do,” Wing said.He curled both hands around Drift’s, and he felt the gears release, the battered hand loosen.Wing took the sword from him, and, seemingly with a thought, willed it away, holding, still, onto Drift’s hand.“The war is over, Drift.The fighting is over. Let it be over within you, as well.”

Drift gave a cry of pain, his huddled frame rocking forward, hand clutching at Wing’s.The jet stood, drawing Drift up with him, his ruined body rising unsteadily against Wing’s too-easy grace. Wing laid his hand over Drift’s chestplate, and he could feel the ebbing light of his own spark pulse brighter, as though trying to touch the hand against him.

“You have never been afraid of anything except this,” Wing said, “except what lies in here.”

He nodded. What else do you do in the presence of truth?

“Look at me,” Wing said, softly—not a command, though if any had ever earned the right to command obedience from Drift, it was he.

And Drift raised his optics, coruscant and blue, to meet the golden stars of Wing’s, like the twin suns of a different planet where everything was strange and beautiful. Drift felt himself dissolve, his pain unknitting itself, his history fraying into filaments of light that fell into the vastness of the universe, both lost to sight and meaning and memory. He felt himself melt, utterly, a sweet annihilation into that golden warmth, that acceptance he’d never had, never dared give himself.

It was over, finally over. And he could finally, finally rest.

In peace.

  
  



End file.
